Long-cooked beef brisket

Cooking my way through The Science of Good Cooking continues, with:

Concept 7: Cook Tough Cuts Beyond Well-Done
Recipe: Onion-Braised Beef Brisket

The idea behind this chapter is that tough meats are full of collagen - a meat binder material. If you cook it for a long time, you get gelatin, which melts and makes meat fall apart.

This chapter was full of recipes for barbecued pork, but I didn't want to mess with wood chips. Instead, I made a tasty beef brisket recipe I've been wanting to make for a while.

You cut up tons of onions and cook them down in the pan. You put the onions and beef together in an aluminum foil packet in the oven on low for hours and hours.

At the end, you separate the meat and cut it up:

And then you cook the sauce down a bit. While the sauce was simmering, I made spätzle to serve with the meat and onion sauce. I know my meat photos are never really the best, but here goes:

It was pretty tasty, but honestly, this one was too much work for me to do on a regular basis. Cutting up those onions, cooking it, cutting up the massive brisket... Ehh. But I'm glad I made it anyway, even if it won't make it into the regular rotation.

Next time is braising meat in a covered pot, where I will be making a chicken paprikash!